Sunday, March 18, 2012

That crazy Casbah sound

How ‘bout that magnificently principled 21st century “anti-war movement” in the US of A, hey? It can’t be bothered to so much as make a peep about a foreign policy that takes an apparently good man like Robert Bales and chews up him and a whole bunch of civilians for nothing.

How is it possible that only ‘wingers & libertarians can speak the truth about these idiotic foreign military occupations that are morally and financially bankrupting us? It blows my mind, but it’s true: the only people of note who are speaking unpopular truths about the war(s) right now are writing not for The Nation; but for Reason and National Review.

Well sure, I mean, yes I said it first, but now Andy McCarthy is saying it better and I hear absolutely no one on the left, not ONE Democrat, saying anything remotely like it:

Toward what end are we putting our best young people through this agony? On Capitol Hill, hawks such as Representative Buck McKeon (R., Calif.) insist that we need to see the war through because “the reason we liberated Afghanistan in 2001 was right then, and it is the same reason we fight today to keep it liberated.”

Ridiculous. We did not send our troops to liberate Afghanistan. We sent them to rout al-Qaeda, which they did with spectacular speed and effectiveness. There is nothing in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) about liberating anyone. The American people would never have supported such a thankless, implausible mission.

Well, this just means OWS doesn’t read the news, which is emphatic that the actual Arab “Arab Spring” has turned out to be all about replacing a couple of tinpot dictators with a far more unsavory bunch of wildly anti-women, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-dog, anti-music, anti-american, anti-democratic, religious fanatics of a certain religious bent.

I should have said, excepting our good friend Dennis Kucinich as always :-)I'm not aware of any big-time lefty political pundit or politician saying that.

Plenty of good writers such as yourself have indeed been speaking up for a long time and they come from the perspective of all political persuasions, but as you note, precisely no one in power is listening.